What made A Trip to the Moon such a popular film? An innovative psychological study offers a few clues. Stephan Schwan and Sermin Ildirar were interested in understanding what happens when someone watches a video for the first time. They found a group of adults in remote regions of Turkey who had never seen a video before. The researchers studied their responses to watching edited films and compared the results with people who were more familiar with video. People who watched film for the first time understood the basics of what is happening onscreen but were confused by some of the editing and misunderstood details of the story. However, people who were familiar with the ideas of a video (cooking a meal, preparing tea, or transporting wood) could understand the story and weren't confused by the edits. People who had more prior exposure to video understood everything, even if they weren't familiar with the ideas in the video.

To sum it up, the only way to fully understand a visual story is by either watching a lot of television and movies or being very familiar with the ideas in the story. For A Trip to the Moon, most of the audience didn't have much experience watching films, but they were VERY familiar with the ideas in this film. Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon, released 37 years before this film, had popularized the idea of space travel. H. G. Wells's The First Men in the Moon expanded on Verne's work by introducing a race of insect-like moon aliens called "Selenites". The tone of Méliès's film mirrors that of Jacques Offenbach's A Trip to the Moon operatic parody of Verne's novels while the structure of the film follows that of an attraction at the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in New York.